What Matters: Why social innovators need design thinking

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Why social innovators need design thinking

11 November 2011

The Takeaway

Design thinking, which encourages consideration of a wide array of solutions, can be applied in the field, and used incrementally, is an important tool for social innovators. It approaches problem solving from the point of view of the end user and calls for developing a deep understanding of unmeet needs, thus avoiding the pitfall of imposing the wrong solution on a community.

We have well-developed tools for tackling social issues based on thoughtful analysis and technological inventiveness, but there has been something missing from the toolbox. We have not traditionally applied design thinking to this set of problems, yet design is a process especially suited to divergent thinking—the exploration of new choices and alternative solutions.

Design thinking is scalable and can be applied incrementally to improve existing ideas (such as how a service is delivered or how a product performs for the user) or it can be applied radically to create disruptive solutions that meet the needs of people in entirely new ways.

Safepoint founder Marc Koska was seeking to reduce the transmission of blood-born diseases through the reuse of syringes. He could have designed better packaging or communications to educate medical staff about the dangers of not properly disposing of used syringes. This approach might have helped in an incremental way. He chose instead to design an entirely new autodisabled syringe that breaks automatically after first use. This disruptive design has the potential to significantly reduce the more than 7 billion unsafe injections given every year.

Design thinking is accessible as an approach to innovation in a way that technical R&D is not. It can be applied by people from a broad range of backgrounds to problems ranging from creating new products and services to redesigning business processes, building new brands, and improving communications.

Design thinking is centered on innovating through the eyes of the end user and as such encourages in-the-field research that builds empathy for people, which results in deeper insights about their unmet needs. This focus helps avoid the common problem of enthusiastic “outsiders” promoting inappropriate solutions and ensures that solutions are rooted in the needs and desires of the community.

And how exactly do you go about it?

Ask a good question. The most important prerequisite to a good idea is a good question. When we face intractable social ills we are doomed to failure if we simply ask the same questions over and over again, expecting to receive different answers. The greatest entrepreneurs and creative problem solvers (social or otherwise) exhibit an ability to ask surprising and insightful questions.

Dr. G. Venkataswamy (Dr. V), founder of the remarkable Aravind Eye Care System that makes high-quality eye care accessible to low income customers, asked the question, “Why can’t the principles of McDonald’s be applied to eye care?” Asking this question led him to creative ideas about efficient, high-quality care that have had untold impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of the poor of South India.

Get close to the lives of those you are trying to serve. Understand their actual needs rather than posing a hypothesis about what they might need. All successful innovations balance the requirements of desirability (what people need), feasibility (what technology can do), and viability (what is sustainable or profitable). Design thinking starts with what is desirable, not what is feasible, in order to seek out the best opportunities to create value and impact for the user.

Build to think and launch to learn. Use prototyping, not speculation, to learn about the viability of ideas and to evolve them toward fitter solutions. Launch simple ideas early but structure to learn from these experiments and iterate the ideas quickly.
Through our work with a US-based consumer goods company, we tried to understand what people in rural Ghana would pay for in terms of health and beauty products. We asked many questions, but not until we set up a mock shop on the side of the road in a village did we understand that people would pay more for some higher-quality, branded products, such as vitamins and toothbrushes, and were reluctant to pay for others, such as detergent and toothpaste. This market knowledge allowed us to recommend a basket of goods, a pricing strategy, and a branding direction to the client, who has now effectively established a microfranchising business.

See the entire business system as a design opportunity. Products and services may be at the core of what poor people need, but often the surrounding infrastructure of distribution, communications and marketing, support services, and business models are the least well developed and offer the most potential for innovation.

In Kumasi, Ghana, we worked with Water and Sanitation for the Urban Poor to design a toilet and system around it for in-home, urban sanitation. We first designed the service and business offering, which led to the pricing, branding, and, finally, design of the product. This offering is now being tested in 100 Kumasi households, with plans to expand to 10,000 households in the near future.

Teach a person to fish…. Sometimes the end solution is not the only benefit of design thinking. We have found that designing effective tools for others to design with can have significant impact. Not every nonprofit has access to designers; indeed, there are far too few designers focused on solving challenges in the social sector. To help mitigate this deficit, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation funded a project to create the Human-Centered Design Toolkit to act as a field guide for NGOs and non-profits looking to innovate. The toolkit has been downloaded well over 60,000 times and used to support projects such as the design of a maternal hospital in Nepal, a cooperative of weavers in Rwanda, water distribution management systems in Malawi, and hand washing stations in Vietnam.

Given the scale and diversity of social challenges facing us today, ranging from climate change to failing education systems to threatened food, water, and energy supplies, to chronic health “pandemics,” I would argue it makes sense to use every approach we have in the toolbox to seek out new solutions to improve the state of the world.

Comment [14]

Agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think. Please include your full name with your comment. Comments may be edited.

I found myself nodding my noggin all the way trhoguh.

Posted 15 December 2011, 04:40 by Kaed
For an example of individuals using social tools to innovate, see:

http://8020vision.com/2011/12/04/innovation-2-0-open-source-urban-agriculture/

A network of 25,000+ people are developing and open-sourcing designs for urban farming. Note, in the video, how what they need the most is not idea people, but testers of the ideas. When there is a balance, the innovation/development process is at its best.

Posted 5 December 2011, 15:48 by jaykimball
This approach looks similar to the 5-level Natural Step framework, that advocates a systems approach to complex problems using backcasting. Very much like a clinicians conference (dashboard) working together to cure a patient. Please see the TNS website.

Posted 24 November 2011, 07:37 by Andrew Deutsch
First of all, what Tim and IDEO advocate is that there isn’t just one way of solving problems as it used be the case, since most problem solving methodologies were based on linear, direct and strictly rational thinking.

The term design in Design Thinking should not be confused with only the design of objects or a discipline known in many places for superficiality and decoration. Design as a discipline was never that and has changed and evolved with the the challenges that required its abilities. Designers are serious professionals that are usually trained to solve problems in a rather different way. They traditionally have used lateral thinking and other non-linear processes to get to a creative and original result. It was inspired in how designers see the world with empathy, human, simple, concrete and feasible ideas that this approach originated. And don’t forget trial and error: prototyping.

The term thinking, doesn’t mean “not doing”, it means the thinking process or the way of thinking which, by the way, for designers is very, very concrete…

Design Thinking as Tim says is scalable, it can and should be applied to deal with systemic challenges. It offers tools to help social innovators to start small, prototype and refine a solution along the way, to be successfull in the process of scaling it.

I’ve seen many discussions with arguments like those we can see on the other comments. People stick with the terminologies Design And Thinking and start either criticizing the approach only by those or just wondering about its effectiveness without trying it out. That’s the opposite of what it stands for. Please, get in contact with someone locally and ask for their help to try it out with a real world problem to solve.

I had to make a comment on this discussion because what Tim is talking about is serious and very important. I lead an innovation group in one of the biggest financial institutions in the world and we apply Design Thinking as our main approach to come up with innovative ideas and how to implement them. We deal with very real situations and have been doing so very successfully.

Posted 22 November 2011, 06:49 by Fabricio Dore
Applying the concept of design to something metaphysical like a business is difficult for many. I know because I have been trying to advance the idea of business design for quite a few years and find much resistance. For instance in Geoff’s post he tries to equate design thinking and systems thinking and that is incorrect. Systems are a subset of the overall design (not to say systems are not designed because they are). Systems exist within the context of the entire design. And the entire design exists within the context of an even larger environment.

As far as “How to exactly go about it?” I have a different, but proven approach.

One point that is necessary to make is Design is only the starting point for Performance. Design is one of the means to the end. “It’s all about Performance”.

Posted 18 November 2011, 13:03 by Stan Kirkwood
Nice article. I am glad that design is getting more attention these days, and it’s also been nice to observe in recent years that several progressive MBA programs are integrating design concepts into their curriculum.

Unfortunately, the business world has bigger fish to fry right now and design won’t likely get its due (at least, not publicly) for awhile.

Posted 16 November 2011, 17:03 by Kim Webb Palacios
Cool an article….it reminds me of an important quote from Master Dyhan Vimal that
“INTELLIGENCE” is the given ability of one to solve his / her own problem(s) hence then, extent the same solutions to those around him / her. If the solutions are not shared; then it’s not INTELLIGENCE in any given context!!

Posted 16 November 2011, 04:38 by Victor Joseph
Immersive learning, as the article rightly points out, is the key to innovation. There is a lot of ‘helicopter drop’ approach in solutions for the grassroots these days especially in Asia and I guess Africa too, and those are bound to fail, since they assume a solution without sensitivity to the context and without thought on optimization of the design for best impact. In the modern world, immersive learning based innovations can be even better systematized by the power of data and text analytics, gleaning information out of the huge conversations going on in the target sector. The insights from data analysis clubbed with the immersive learning by innovators in the field, introduced in an ‘Agile’ approach is a sure way to maximize innovation and impact.

Posted 15 November 2011, 23:54 by Jacob Varghese
Design thinking is critical but the point comes as to when does thinking stop and converting to product begin. Design thinking should never stop and go on to the evolution of the product, but it needs the right mix of thinking and conversion. I guess this is very experience comes in.

Posted 15 November 2011, 20:21 by Subrahmanyam Ivatury
Great article Tim.

On your point of teaching a person to fish, I am a faculty member of a new masters program in Design for Social Innovation at the School of Visual Arts. We will be training social innovators in design thinking as well as design doing. Design is a powerful force for accelerating systemic social innovations whose time has come. We welcome a broad range of professionals (not just those who currently self-identify as “designers”) to join us in the journey and in the broader movement.

http://dsi.sva.edu/

Posted 15 November 2011, 17:17 by Lee-Sean Huang

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